Blue Smoke

Deb, I’m refreshed. Time for round two.”
    This time he sodomized her.
    Her eyes were dull and distant when he was finished. She’d stopped fighting and lay limp. He could probably perk her up for another go, but a man had a schedule to keep, after all.
    He showered, humming to himself and using her lime-scented body gel. Dressed, he lined up what he could use from her own kitchen.
    Cleaning fluid, rags, candles, waxed paper. No need to make it look like an accident, but no point in being sloppy. A man should take pride in his work.
    He snapped on the surgical gloves from his backpack. While he was soaking rags, the phone rang. He paused, waiting, listened to the bright, female voice that came on after the answering machine picked up.
    “Hi, Mom. It’s just me, checking in. I guess you’re out on a hot date.” There was a tinkle of laughter. “Give me a call if you don’t get home too late. Otherwise, I’ll talk to you tomorrow. Love you. Bye.”
    “Isn’t that sweet?” Joey whined as he continued to work. “Yeah, your mom’s got a hot one tonight.”
    He chipped up some of the vinyl tile to expose the subflooring, used the electric screwdriver out of his pack to remove some of the cupboard doors to tent into funnels for flame. He cracked the window for ventilation, set his trailers of rags and loosely crumpled waxed paper.
    Satisfied, he carried candles and rags into the bedroom.
    She was only half conscious now, but he saw what was left of her go on alert, the fear that leaped into her eyes.
    “Sorry, Deb, just don’t have time for a third round, so we’re going to move straight to the grand finale. Your cocksucking husband ever bring his work home?” he asked, and pulled out a knife.
    She went wild—still some life in the old girl yet—when he turned the blade in the light.
    “You ever have discussions about how he spent his workday? He ever bring pictures home so you could see what happens to people who burn in bed?”

    He brought the knife down, viciously, an inch from her hip. Those hips reared up, and she began to struggle madly, gurgling, air wheezing out her nose, her eyes so wide he wondered they didn’t just pop out of her skull like a couple of olives.
    He scored the mattress, pulling stuffing free. After replacing his knife, he took a container out of his pack. “I used some of your kitchen supplies in the other room. Hope you don’t mind. But in here, I brought my own. A little methyl alcohol. Goes a long way.”
    He soaked the scattered stuffing, rags, the sheets she’d soiled in terror, drawing them onto the floor, using them and the rags, the rest of the waxed paper as a trailer to her curtains.
    He set her lamp on the floor, and whistled between his teeth as he dismantled her bedside table. “Just like making a campfire,” he told her as he arranged tepees of wood over the trailers. “See the methyl alcohol, it’s got a flash point below a hundred degrees. The pine oil I used in the kitchen, it’ll take a lot more heat, closer to two hundred—that’s Fahrenheit. But you set it all up right, it’ll burn pretty good once it gets going. Out there, that’s what we’re calling my second wave. What they call a point of origin. In here’s the main show, and, Deb, you’re the star. Just a couple more details, first.”
    He picked up her little desk chair and stood on it to open the casing of the bedroom smoke alarm. Unhooked the battery.
    Since it was handy, he broke the chair apart, used it to arrange another tent on the mattress.
    He stepped back, nodded. “Not bad, not bad at all, if I do say so myself. Damn, getting another woody here.” He rubbed his crotch. “Wish I could give you one more taste of it, honey, but I’ve got places to go.”
    He arranged books of matches along the trailers, inside the tents, smiled—coolly now—while she twisted, beat her heels against the mattress, strained to scream through the gag.
    “Sometimes the smoke gets you first. Sometimes it doesn’t. The way I’ve set this up, you’re going to hear your own skin crackling. You’re going to smell yourself roasting.”

    His eyes went flat as a shark’s, and just as cold. “They won’t get to you in time, Deb. No point in false hope, right? And when you see that cocksucking husband of yours in hell, tell him Joseph Francis Pastorelli Junior sends his best.”
    He used a long, slim butane lighter—let her see the flame spurt out of it before he set mattress wadding,